Enough Consumer Coolness: It’s Time to Make a Case for Windows 10 in the Enterprise

By Josh Greenbaum

I’ll start by saying that I came home after having watched the Windows 10 launch (on video, not live, more on that later) all excited to show my kids the demos of HoloLens, particularly as I was sure I saw a little Minecraft in there, a serious favorite of the underage crowd in my house. Too late. My son, in perusing YouTube for the latest in Minecraft music videos, announced as I walked in that he had already seen the HoloLens demo, and wondered when he was going to be able to play 3D holographic Minecraft.

If ever anyone was wondering why Microsoft bought Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, just search “Minecraft video” on YouTube: The results (37 million hits) infinitely outstrip searching “Windows enterprise” (232,000 hits) by more than 100 to 1. And therein lies the crux of this post.

I mention this not just because it’s another example of how hard it is for the older generation to keep up with the newer one, but also as an example of how the Windows 10 launch, despite the use of the word “enterprise” a dozen times or more, was as much a showcase of how much the Windows team has an uphill battle to fight in creating buzz for enterprise computing as it was another example of how cool Microsoft can actually be when it puts its mind to it, as long as it’s not in the enterprise.

Can Microsoft afford this version of coolness, particularly when it comes to the enterprise? Hardly. This week’s earnings announcement was credited with killing the Dow Industrial Average on Tuesday, and in most categories there were a lot of disappointing results. But Dynamics, the enterprise little brother of the Microsoft Commercial division, put in a relatively stellar 13 percent growth rate. (Which parts of that were Dynamics CRM, AX, and the rest is never disclosed, unfortunately.) So, ignoring a solid growth opportunity, albeit a relatively small one, seems a little short-sighted. Particularly as Dynamics is the place where all of Microsoft (minus Minecraft, at least for now) is best highlighted.

There were some enterprisey tidbits in the announcement – the free upgrades from Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 are sure to make corporate IT folks happy. A new browser to replace Internet Explorer 11, the bane of developers and users with its anomalous script handling and other defects, will surely be welcome in IT shops that haven’t just shrugged their shoulders and shifted to Chrome. And the seamless interaction of Office and Skype across the full panoply of devices on stage was enterprisey enough, sort of – if you’re one of those people who think Office and Skype are enterprise apps (which, considering that the Minecraft generation in my house also uses them, sort of makes its enterprise cred highly suspect.)

But sort of isn’t what’s going to light the enterprise on fire. And here’s my problem with the Windows 10 launch: While the biggest selling point of Windows 10 – a single code base for building apps that run across every possible device – was definitely part of the messaging of the event, the evidence that Microsoft knows what this really means for the enterprise, or even what makes enterprise users tick, was missing in action. Again.

HoloLens certainly has some serious enterprise potential, as does Cortana, and the demo of Surface Hub, a giant wall-sized touch screen, which is right up there with jet packs and teleportation in the futuristic coolness category, certainly had something to make enterprise execs salivate. But none of that coolness is enough to get enterprise developers who build the new business apps, and the business decision makers (to use a Microsoft term) who spec out those apps and write the checks for them, to go all-in with Windows 10.

Microsoft finds itself once again caught falling down that classic chasm between offering coolness and offering solutions to practical business problems. What the Windows 10 launch showed is another example of how tech companies try to sell technology the same way they develop it. The tech dev cycle that starts with specifying a new feature, and then building, debugging, rewriting, testing, and demoing it at event like last week’s Windows 10 launch party leaves out the last mile that a business user is looking for: how does this change my business process and move my KPIs into the success zone? Importantly, coolness isn’t necessarily a virtue in the enterprise. Who the hell has the time to be just cool?

Or, to rephrase that last thought: what’s cool in the enterprise is something that solves a real, and important, problem right now. Not sometime down the road, as in when virtual reality will become a tool for enterprise success, once we’ve figured out how and why.

So I’ve asked for, and have yet to see, any evidence that Microsoft knows what that killer enterprise app looks like. It may be that they honestly don’t know, or even care. Both of which are bad mistakes to be making at this juncture. On the contrary, Microsoft has to up its enterprise game ASAP, before it loses an opportunity to define the next generation business app platform for an enterprise audience increasingly assaulted by more incumbent vendors pitching competing platforms that have a more definable enterprise edge.

Three key factors are making the clock tick faster and louder on getting the enterprise case for Windows 10 out in front of the market.

The Platform Wars. Two really big and really important competitors are pushing their enterprise platform strategies a whole lot more effectively than Microsoft is right now – Salesforce.com and SAP. Their customers – virtually all of which overlap with Windows – are being pushed by aggressive direct sales and marketing campaigns to get on program with each companies’ respective platform strategy. HoloLens and free Windows upgrades aren’t enough to combat this push. Windows 10 could be the leading edge of a comprehensive enterprise platform strategy (along with Azure and .NET) that could give Microsoft something to say to Force.com and HANA cloud. If only….

The Enterprise Phone Wars. As I have written previously, Microsoft is in serious danger of losing the US market for Windows Phone before it has even gotten started, and, most ironically, just when it has a new OS, Windows Phone 8.1, that is rated as good or better than IOS or Android. The cross-platform capabilities of Windows 10 won’t be nearly as impressive if Windows Phone isn’t one of the platforms enterprise developers think is important – and right now they don’t: few if any enterprise developers are developing for Windows Phone.

Pushing the cross-platform capabilities of Windows 10 in the enterprise could, just maybe, light a fire under the enterprise dev community, which right now is stuck worrying about how to build and maintain interfaces between mobile, desktop, and tablet environments. While HTML5 is a good workaround, running an app in the native mobile environment is acknowledged to be the truly optimal choice. But if the app has to go to a different device, it’s interface time, and Microsoft loses.

(A follow-up to my post on Windows Phone 8.1 and Verizon cited above: a week after that post appeared, Verizon quietly pushed an update to my phone. During the last month of playing with it, I think it is truly superior to IOS. Too bad Verizon still isn’t really on-board with Windows Phone 8.1. But thanks, anyway.)

The Business Process Innovation Wars. Business users need innovations that solve business problems, as noted above. This requires the innovation provider to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of existing business processes in order to propose – and then deliver – ways in which the processes can be innovated. Delivering proof that this process knowledge is baked into their offerings is becoming job #1 for enterprise software companies, and everywhere I turn there’s an increasing clamor from customers to show how a given innovation matters in terms of vertical and micro-vertical functionality, preferably cross-indexed with geographical or regional requirements. In other words, business innovation is increasingly about defining, and then delivering on, that last mile of innovation that matters most to the customer, particularly the business customer. Windows 10 so far has no real story to tell in that regard.

Can Microsoft pull out of its self-inflicted Windows tailspin before all that’s left is Minecraft and virtual reality? Yes, but that means it has to be ready to take a very different – or maybe parallel –route to market with Windows 10. This means connecting Windows 10 to the aspirations of enterprise users, and toning down some of the gee-whiz in favor of the get-it-done. This means, as I have said already, showcasing that killer enterprise app that makes the case for Windows 10. Or making the case that the Cortana, Skype, Office, and the new IE, Spartan, will have a huge, direct impact on day-to-day enterprise processes and their users. This also means taking some of the really awesome innovations going on in Microsoft Dynamics, such as its Lifecycle Services offering, a cloud-based enterprise software tool unlike anything in the industry, and connecting its capabilities to Windows 10 (if possible, and I think it is.)

In other words, it means stopping something I’ve railed against for a long time: pretending that the Windows team, and its traditional gang of influencers, really gets the enterprise. They don’t, full stop. And instead of pretending, the Windows gang need to acknowledge this lacuna and get started with reaching out to the enterprise, both internally and externally. Internally, there’s this group called Dynamics, who were also missing in action during the Windows 10 event, that actually get the enterprise and would be more than willing and able to lend the Windows team some legitimate enterprise cred. Externally, there’s a few thousand partners who could also play that role, also willing and able to step up to the plate.

And finally, there are the enterprise influencers, myself included, who seem to be consistently excluded from the dialogue. I tried to attend the Windows 10 event, and was rebuffed, however nicely. And having seen how sparse the real enterprise message was at the event, it was probably for the best that I stayed in the office and watched the event on line.

Until the enterprise story is told about Windows 10, by people who really get the enterprise, Microsoft will be leaving one of its best assets sitting on the sidelines of an increasingly critical moment in the enterprise software market. And judging by the market’s reaction to last quarter’s numbers, it’s a pretty critical moment for Microsoft overall. I think Windows 10 can make a difference in Microsoft’s enterprise software competitive profile, but convincing Microsoft continues to be a Sisyphean task.

If Microsoft will be content with Xbox, Minecraft and office productivity success, then no harm, no foul. But if there are aspirations for greatness in the enterprise, it’s time to show what Windows 10 can do. Or we’ll all be running watching Minecraft videos on our iPhones and Chromebooks, instead of running our enterprises on Windows phones, tablets, and desktops. While that’s just what Apple and Google want to see and hear (and Salesforce.com , SAP, Oracle, Infor, and others), I’m pretty sure that’s not what Satya Nadella had in mind when he took the job. Right?

Monday, Sep 29, 2014

ARTICLE: It’s year four in the Charles Phillips era at Infor, and the more things change the more they remain the same. The changes are impressive – new functionality across a wide swath of its legacy product lines, a new release of Infor XI, its next generation suite, a focus on industry-specific clouds that is such a good idea that I expect it will attract copycats from all over the market, a dedicated data science consulting team, new capabilities for defining and delivering best practices in implementations – it’s a long list, and it all looks good.

Thursday, Jan 22, 2015

BLOG POST: SAP’s annual sales kickoff meeting season, FKOM, is under way, with the North American and European versions kicking off this week. FKOM is where the new strategies, products, alliances, and services are all pressure-tested on that thin, white-shirted line of sales people who have the unenviable job of syncing the year’s marketing strategy with the desperate desires of SAP’s customers, and then getting them to actually write a check. It’s a mating ritual that is equal parts science and art, and its quarterly execution is one of the software industry’s greatest and most mystical natural wonders.

Wednesday, Jan 28, 2015

BLOG POST: While the biggest selling point of Windows 10 – a single code base for building apps that run across every possible device – was definitely part of the messaging of the event, the evidence that Microsoft knows what this really means for the enterprise, or even what makes enterprise users tick, was missing in action. Again.

Wednesday, Feb 11, 2015

BLOG POST: There’s a lot to unpack from SAP’s S4 HANA announcement of last week, but if I could only highlight the essence of what the announcement means for SAP and its customers, it’s this: SAP needs to make sure every customer understands how the versions of SAP they are running today will lead them to S4 HANA, in what time frame and at what cost.

Thursday, Feb 12, 2015

Wednesday, Mar 4, 2015

BLOG POST: Back in the early stages of the SaaS market, so many months ago, it seemed obvious that the SaaS market would one day undergo a major transformation as the easy wins based on taking on-premise capabilities and flipping them to the cloud – pretty much the business model of Salesforce.com in the early days– gave way to an era of greater complexity and value. At one time it was the value-added cloud capabilities of business networks and the like that were supposed to lead the SaaS world to the promised land by using the cloud to conduct business in ways that simply hadn’t been possible in the on-premise world.
Wrong. So far, anyway.

Monday, Jun 1, 2015

ARTICLE: Test driving the HoloLens, Microsoft’s soon-to-be released augmented reality headset, it’s easy to forget the challenges facing Satya Nadella as his first year on the job starts to take shape.

Tuesday, Sep 8, 2015

ARTICLE: At a press/analyst meeting last spring, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was asked whether he had any plans to build out an Amazon AWS-like capability to complement the rest of his cloud strategy. His scoffing reply was right on the money. Competing with AWS and other commodity-level cloud services was “a race to the bottom,” Benioff replied. Case closed.

Tuesday, Oct 13, 2015

ARTICLE: Microsoft’s five-year Windows Phone freefall is living, or dying, proof that there are only so many second chances in tech, even for the kings of second chances, and it’s finally time to throw in the towel on another great phone OS that never lived up to its potential. (ah, Palm OS, we hardly knew ya too.)

Thursday, Nov 12, 2015

ARTICLE: You’ve got to love a company that brags at its user conference that its motto is Learn, Laugh, Share, Connect. Don’t hear that too often. What you also don’t see very often is the other characteristic that makes the company in question, Kinaxis, unique: it’s a highly profitable, cloud-only company. And when I say profitable, I mean profitable, as in a net profit margin of 16% of its $23.8 million in revenue last quarter.

Wednesday, Jan 13, 2016

ARTICLE: Salesforce.com kicked off the analyst season with the first analyst summit of the year, and aside from inciting back-to-school analogies from an overly-relaxed group of analysts, some clear wins and opportunities, and a few issues, emerged that will both set the bar for the competition and keep Salesforce execs from entertaining any notions of complacency.

Wednesday, Feb 17, 2016

ARTICLE: Every vendor, whether old guard freshening up for the cloud, or new guard playing defense against the dark arts, has a cloud platform strategy with two purported goals: offer value to customers and confer an easy way for partners to make up for the lost revenue implicit in the cloud’s ability to sop up a lot of low-hanging fruit previously left for partners to pick.

Monday, Apr 4, 2016

ARTICLE: As the enterprise software market embraces the concept of digital transformation with typical reckless, feckless abandon, it’s interesting to see how one of the most transformative concepts – business networks – is evolving. What’s clear from a look at two of the most well thought-out strategies, those of Infor (via its GT Nexus acquisition) and SAP (via its Ariba acquisition), is that there’s no shortage of merit to what these two companies are doing and planning.

Friday, Jun 3, 2016

BLOG POST: The first time I ever attended a user group meeting was way back at the dawn of my career, when I was managing a pioneering print-on-demand/desktop publishing system for a specialty publisher. I went to the meeting to find out if the vendor was ever going to fix the latest version of its software, which was basically dead-on-arrival. To my surprise, the CEO took to the stage, apologized profusely, begged forgiveness, promised to fix the problem or else, and otherwise completely humbled himself in front of his irate customers.

Sunday, Jun 5, 2016

BLOG POST: In case you don’t know the drill, SAP’s biggest challenge of all is to funnel everything that’s good and true and important to the company into CEO Bill McDermott’s keynote. The process is simple – start with a blank sheet, put some ideas on paper, and then watch as the jostling, politicking, and pitching begins to fill out Bill’s time on stage.

Wednesday, Jun 8, 2016

BLOG POST: It’s now standard operating procedure at virtually every conference I attend: the execs on stage are talking about a disrupted digital future and how they can enable it to an audience that’s pretty much focused on how their vendor can help them do a better job today: The future can wait.

Wednesday, Jun 15, 2016

BLOG POST: If someone were to write the “The Tech Event Manager’s Guide to Engaging a Millennial Audience”, a look at Salesforce.com’s recent TrailheaDX conference would be a great place to start. Similarly, if someone wanted to write the “Platform Vendors’ Guide to Building an Engaged Developer Audience”, that same TrailheaDX conference would also serve as an excellent model.

Wednesday, Jun 22, 2016

BLOG POST: Sometimes revolutions start with a shot heard round the world, and sometimes they start with a quiet nudge in a new direction. The latter form of revolution was nudged into being for SAP’s HR customers last April in the form of eight words uttered by Mike Ettling, the president of SAP SuccessFactors, during an analyst summit in San Francisco. Ettling’s eight words have been said before, but the fact that they come from a man who is re-writing what it means to be a cloud company, and thereby what it means for customers to consume cloud services, adds enormous gravitas to the moment.

Tuesday, Jun 28, 2016

BLOG POST: The opportunities for IoT innovation abound. The ability, for example, to optimize the angle of the blades of a wind turbine in real time, or identify and track the contents of a pallet of parts as it moves through the supply chain, will change the underlying operations of every industry and every individual in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.

Monday, Jul 11, 2016

BLOG POST: “Cybersecurity is a cat and mouse game where the mouse gets bigger and more ferocious by the minute,” stated Joshua Greenbaum, analyst, Enterprise Applications Consulting, in his discussion of the topics to be addressed at the upcoming Rock Stars of Cybersecurity Threats and Countermeasures, September 13, 2016, in Seattle. “Security threats can’t be minimized. That’s why companies of all sizes are running to the cloud.”

Tuesday, Oct 18, 2016

BLOG POST: All the attention on whether Russia or some other nation-state entity is trying to hack the election in November or how organized gangs are flooding PCs with ransomware has obscured that truth about where the real threat to our collective cybersecurity comes from: our employees.

Monday, Nov 28, 2016

BLOG POST: As the enterprise software market slowly morphs into the enterprise software and platform market, it’s become necessary to carefully define what it means to be a successful platform vendor. Importantly, that definition has nothing to do with technology – okay, maybe a little – but it does have a whole lot to do with people and perceptions.

Monday, Dec 12, 2016

BLOG POST: Cloud computing, the artist formerly known as SaaS, has always been a proving ground for dynamic leadership. The standard – brash, outspoken, ubiquitous, successful – was set once upon a time by Marc Benioff, and ever since it’s been easy to measure cloud leadership by what I call the Benioff Scale. On a Benioff Scale of 1-10, where 1 is Ginni (Ginni who?) Rometty of IBM, and 10 is Marc himself, measuring cloud leadership by how many Benioffs a particular leader generates is as good a method as any.

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2017

BLOG POST: SAP’s S/4 HANA has been called many things, but to characterize it as the future of SAP is far from hyperbole. SAP has minced no words in affirming that the path from R/2 to R/3 to ECC eventually leads to S/4 HANA. The question is not an “if”, but a “when.”
When, however, has been the tricky question – when will the customers sign on in droves, when will SAP put in the critical mass of the functionality customers need in S/4 in order for the transition to make sense, and when will S/4 become a significant revenue-maker for SAP?

Thursday, May 11, 2017

BLOG POST: Part of the fun and challenge of following SAP is that its present and future are defined by the intersection of its own peculiarities and the peculiarities of the markets it lives in. This interplay means that SAP, like many large software companies, isn’t just a single company with a single overarching strategy: it’s really many companies with many strategies. The trick for SAP is to make sure they overlap more than they contradict each other.

Friday, May 12, 2017

BLOG POST: We’re back, discoursing on the challenges SAP will face as platform proliferation and the shifting of the edge app issue into the hands of the LOB developer influences what vendor’s tools and platform will be used to power its customers’ digital transformations. Where we last left off, I was about to illustrate SAP’s dilemma with a true-to-life story.)

Friday, Jun 9, 2017

BLOG POST: There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about the differences between S/4 HANA On-premise/Private Cloud and S/4 HANA Public Cloud. And that confusion threatens to derail the growing momentum around the company’s flagship cloud products.

Friday, Aug 11, 2017

BLOG POST: Apparently my blog post last month accusing Microsoft of neglecting its Dynamics product line struck a nerve. The gist of the post was that Dynamics was falling into irrelevance as Microsoft seemed to focus on bigger and better things.

Sunday, Sep 24, 2017

BLOG POST: This is the year of hyping artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT). Any vendor with any vision, which is everyone, is blanketing customers and partners with pronouncements and keynotes that highlight an increasingly large roster of products, platforms, and technologies loosely organized under the AI/ML/IoT rubric. The result is that these acronyms and the products they represent are everywhere, singing, and dancing their way to our hearts.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

BLOGPOST: Can the Internet of Highly Insecure Things Be Trusted to Run the One True Network?
As the dust settles on the recent changes at SAP, and with SAPPHIRE looming large, it’s worth taking a look at what I think will be one of the most interesting, ambitious, and potentially lucrative bets SAP has made in a long time. The bet is on Ariba and its vision for a global, competitor-crushing, B2B network. At stake is nothing short of a major reconfiguration of the global economy, global trade, global service delivery, and pretty everything else that falls under the rubric of B2B commerce as we know it.

Monday, Sep 1, 2014

Monday, Sep 15, 2014

BLOGPOST: I’m heading to the SuccessFactors user conference, SuccessConnect, in Las Vegas this week and, as a prelude to the conference, here’s some of the questions I’m looking to have answered during the course of the conference.

Thursday, Sep 18, 2014

PODCAST: SuccessFactors’ user conference, SuccessConnect, has come and gone, and the four questions I posed in my previous post about the challenges facing SuccessFactors and SAP were largely answered. But, as in any good dialectic, one good answer is just the starting point for another good question….. I’ll start with the Workday question/answer in this post, and continue with answers to my other three questions in a subsequent post.

Tuesday, Sep 23, 2014

BLOGPOST: The fundamental problems plaguing Oracle won’t go away with Larry moving into an executive chairman role, this is more lipstick on a pig than a serious attempt to get the company back on course. The problem is that shuffling the deck chairs does nothing for dealing with the company’s three fundamental problems. Until these are addressed, I think it’s safe to assume there will be no turnaround any time soon.

Friday, Oct 10, 2014

BLOGPOST: The news that Meg Whitman is finally pulling the plug on the Sisyphian task of trying to resurrect HP has profound implications for the future of Oracle, and not just because the mess that Whitman was unable to unravel was an HP made functionally unmanageable by a previous HP CEO: Mark Hurd, now co-CEO of Oracle. I think Oracle has been on the leadership skids for a while, but Hurd’s track record at HP, the end-game of which is now being played out in the breakup of the once-vaunted tech leader, provides a good roadmap for how Oracle ends up on the chopping block like HP.

Friday, Oct 24, 2014

BLOGPOST: It’s hard to slog through mega-conferences like Dreamforce, and not just because 135,000 people are way too much for San Francisco and its Moscone Center to handle. The sheer girth of Salesforce.com is also a factor: the company has become an immensely complicated and multifaceted company, maybe too much so for a single conference. Regardless, Dreamforce reminds me of why I don’t see my favorite bands in a coliseum setting: The volume needed to fill a coliseum washes out the undertones and overtones that make music a rich and complex listening experience, instead leaving the listener to sort through a lot of random, washed out noise.

Thursday, Oct 30, 2014

BLOGPOST: There’s always a lot to say about Microsoft, and, like any big company, it’s usually a mix of good or bad. Having spent two days last week at the Microsoft Dynamics analyst event, I think that when it comes to the enterprise, most of what there is to say about Microsoft isn’t just good: Microsoft’s enterprise story just gets better and better, and while there are holes and issues abounding, the old maxim that Microsoft eventually gets it right was very much in evidence last week (with one notable, and important exception).

Tuesday, Nov 18, 2014

BLOGPOST: Hanging out with Kinaxis, the relatively small and always interesting supply chain vendor from Ottawa, Canada, never fails to be an eye-opening experience. It’s not just that I get to meet with a vendor and a loyal cadre of customers who are collectively pushing the envelope on all things supply chain, it’s that sometimes they’re pushing an envelope I hadn’t seen before in my peregrinations in the supply chain world.
This year’s Kinexions user conference was no different. What I heard from Kinaxis about taking Rapid Response, its in-memory supply chain planning product, further into the realm of collaboration by pushing users to self-identify their areas of responsibility represented an excellent strategic direction on the part of Kinaxis

Tuesday, Dec 2, 2014

PODCAST: There is perhaps no contemporary issue at the intersection of technology and public policy that is more contentious and conflicted than net neutrality. The issue itself has probably accounted for its own increase in Internet traffic over the last couple of years as opinions, jeremiads, official proclamations, and even HBO’s John Oliver, have weighed in on the issue.

Wednesday, Dec 10, 2014

BLOGPOST: I think it’s pretty fair to say that counting Microsoft out in a market it has made a commitment to is a classic rookie mistake that serves as the epitaph for too many forgotten companies. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again is a time-honored mantra in Redmond. And it’s pretty evident that Windows Phone is one of those areas where Microsoft has made big commitments – including but hardly limited to its $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia’s phone business – and where the company is on the record as committed to try try again.

Friday, Feb 13, 2015

BLOGPOST: So, smooth sailing for S/4 HANA?– Not likely, certainly nothing like the good old days when R/3 was the biggest and the baddest modern, client/server, enterprise software product on the market, marauding through the global economy like a rum-soaked buccaneer.

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